Rosemarys Role and Symbolism in The Giver

In the novel The Giver (1993), Lois Lowry creates the character of Rosemary, the former Receiver of Memory, who turns out to be one of the most potent symbols of ethical outcome and emotional honesty in the novel. She does not feature much in the story, but in her position, she represents the philosophical paradox at the center of Lowry’s dystopia, which is the human cost of mass amnesia. The collision of memory, emotion, and control places Rosemary not only as a tragic character but as a moral agent through whom Lowry can intersect the paradox of freedom and suffering: the need to suffer to maintain identity.

The brief nature of Rosemary in the novel could be regarded as an indicator of the frailty of the ideological backdrop of the society. She is an emotional experiment, struggling to control her emotions by recalling the memories of the Giver. That she perceives the images of love, pain, and loss suffocate her and makes her insist on release as a euphemism for euthanasia. Lowry (1993) uses this to satirize institutionalized ignorance: the release system becomes a ritualized moral blanking out which propagates the illusion of peace. The fact that Rosemary is killed is one interruption with the social order of the society, an act that reveals the repressed truth comes out.

Modern scholarly articles criticize the role of memory as being one of the forms of resistance in The Giver. Although this is true, Jaithlia (2023) indicates that the transfer of memories to the Receiver makes people comprehend the past; the reason is that it presents emotions, experiences, and colors, which were known by the residents previously. Rosemary's failure to hold on to this emotional inheritance is an indication that empathy and system homogeneity do not go together. Let not the very mark of submissiveness signify feebleness; her failure shows defiance; her humanity is inflexible to the rationale of suppressive authoritarianism. The memories she unleashes are critical to the transfer of individual sorrow into communal unrest.

In developing this idea, Campos (2022) conceptualizes memories within the novel by Lowry as a form of bargain between the past and the future, a present-oriented agent that determines the continuity of moral values. Rosemary is an individual who embodies this contradiction: she inherits historical trauma, but lacks the capacity to bear the burden of it long enough to imagine ethical renewal. The fact that she commits suicide makes the time flow harder; the position of the Receiver is meant to hold on to, and the irony is that it is the thing that keeps the memory alive as it does. The resulting disorder of her death forces the population to start accounting for the history they have pushed aside, which is the discovery of what Campos (2022) refers to as the cyclic aspect of the interplay between memory and futurity. The sacrifice that Rosemary makes, in this sense, is regression and rebirth; out of her destruction, the moral imagination of a society that has sterilized itself is revived to its former complexity of emotions.

This reading is supported by the psycho-social aspect of the novel. The community tries to abolish memory mirrors. This is what Campos (2022) refers to as the "Collective future thought". Regarding this, it can be referred to as a mechanism of denial that society uses to maintain peace while hiding the truth. Rosemary's breakdown reveals the impossibility of this repression. Her battle with the trauma presents the absurdity of the institution's tranquility and makes her death a moral lesson to the Giver and Jonas. Lowry uses her to dramatize the dialectic of innocence/knowledge that is: emotional awareness, painful as it is, is the only means of ethical existence - the memory of Rosemary is an internal rebellion in the inheritors of her story.

The character’s name also contributes to her symbolism, as Rosemary in literature often represents memory. Both Jaithlia (2023) and Campos (2022) underline the fact that Lowry creates a memory as the ethical foundation of individuality. The literalization of the danger of past erasing is centered on the death of Rosemary, as without memory, there is no compassion. Her name is an epitaph as well as a prophecy. It is her sacrifice that makes the remembrance pure as the state of true humanity. The community does not remember her, but she continues to exist as a symbol in the eyes of the Giver and Jonas, which proves Lowry's idea that memory is not a death sentence.

Overall, the story of Rosemary ultimately determines the moral development of The Giver, as her rejection of a painless life brings back the moral dimension to a society constructed on emotional sterilization. The future-oriented nature of memory, as Campos (2022) notes, requires facing suffering; with such facing, Rosemary will be the moral hub of the novel invisibly. Her part is to turn personal anguish into communal renaissance- an act which gives back meaning to both love and loss. The narration puts Lowry at the center of the human mind: she is the image of recollection, which cannot be destroyed even by the process of erasing.